


When I Stand Before Thee At The Day's End

by Nike_SGA



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Dystopian society, Gen, One Shot, Pre-Adoption, mutant AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-06
Updated: 2018-07-06
Packaged: 2019-06-06 05:12:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15187550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nike_SGA/pseuds/Nike_SGA
Summary: She’s lost her job, her home, her life. And now she has nothing but a doctor’s gift for healing the sick, and no-one left to use it on, save those who come crawling into these hastily provided safe-houses sporting tears and wounds and bullet-holes from fighting the authorities or the vigilantes, and fighting each other.





	When I Stand Before Thee At The Day's End

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally inspired by the Coyote SGA Mutant 'verse created by LJ user irony_rocks, but you don't really need to be familiar with the AU, just the premise:  
>  _In the aftermath of a massive toxic spill in the summer of '96 at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, California's atmosphere was polluted with a radioactive substance that altered the genetics of many ordinary citizens. The end result: millions of people developed abnormal abilities due to these mutations._

_CA, 1996._

In the first months after the spill, there are still some places that open their doors to provide shelter for those left adrift, the people run out of their homes and families in the initial wave of fear and revulsion that accompanies the endless news cycles on TV. Old warehouses in the downtown districts; abandoned shops. Some of the churches, too, and it’s here that she finds somewhere to sleep at night, alone with her sense of bitter irony. 

Janet Fraiser hasn’t seen the inside of a church for years and now, when she’s most sure that there is no God, can be no god who’s responsible for this, she figures if there’s still some possibility one does exist, the least He can do is put a roof over her head.

She’d been at the frontline, so to speak, when disaster struck; working at the UCLA Med Centre in L.A, a specialist in rare and exotic diseases. When the first mutations started to show she’d naturally been among the first they’d turned too. Initially they’d wanted her to study the results of the people who began drifting through the doors, to try and find a connection or an explanation or _a cure, please, a cure_ , but as drift turned to tide and more and more of them filled the emergency room and the clinic and, eventually, the hallways, she became just another body struggling against the rising swell of fright and panic. They’d clutched at her as she’d examined them and treated them as best she could, with hands that sometimes felt like ice and sometimes burned, skin rippling under her fingers and changing colour or shape or texture while she worked. She’d been working days and nights, on and on, exhausted and with no end in sight until the day she’d stepped forward to suture the temple of a man whose head had been gashed open by _one of them, one of those **freaks**_ , and before she’d had time to raise her needle the skin knitted under her touch as though it had never been parted.

It didn’t take the hospital long to figure out which one of them was the mutant.

She could have been their biggest advantage, she reflects with a sigh, the stinging resentment now faded into weariness. If they’d just given her a chance, the chance to see how far she could take it, how strong she could become. She might not have been able to reach into them and rewrite DNA or reverse this…this _thing_ that was happening, but she could have helped. She knows she could. They just wouldn’t let her. 

She’s lost her job, her home, her life. And now she has nothing but a doctor’s gift for healing the sick, and no-one left to use it on, save those who come crawling into these hastily provided safe-houses sporting tears and wounds and bullet-holes from fighting the authorities or the vigilantes, and fighting each other. It’s good work she’s doing, and it’s appreciated in the quarters where she’s needed, but she feels stuck and empty and alone, and she can’t keep doing it forever. 

She’s walking back to the church now, finished with what she jadedly calls ‘her rounds’ whenever the priest or the few new acquaintances she’s scraped together asks where she’s been. When she slips back through the heavy doors she pauses though. In the dim light filtering through the high windows - the ones that haven’t been destroyed by projectile masonry and boarded up - she can make out people hunched in corners, standing holding whispered conversations, some sleeping. There’s a small figure, though, sitting on her pallet, drawing a scratchy woollen blanket around her shoulders to cover pink pyjamas and watching her warily though curtains of limp, brown hair. Her name’s Cassandra, the priest’s voice at her shoulder informs her, she’s eleven years old, and she can move things with her mind.

Janet walks slowly towards the bed, not breaking the child’s gaze until she lowers herself to sit next to her on the thin mattress. They sit, side by side in silence for long minutes, and somehow Janet feels herself on the edge of something; at a corner. The girl keeps her eyes averted as she speaks, woodenly.

“My Mom doesn’t want me anymore.”

It’s a simple, complicated statement that changes everything. Janet brushes Cassandra’s hair back from her face and regards her for a moment, then reaches out, takes her hand, and begins to heal.

~


End file.
